English

An Introduction to Computational Fluctuating Hydrodynamics

Fluid Dynamics 2025-05-01 v2 Numerical Analysis Numerical Analysis

Abstract

These notes are an introduction to fluctuating hydrodynamics (FHD) and the formulation of numerical schemes for the resulting stochastic partial differential equations (PDEs). Fluctuating hydrodynamics was originally introduced by Landau and Lifshitz as a way to put thermal fluctuations into a continuum framework by including a stochastic forcing to each dissipative transport process (e.g., heat flux). While FHD has been useful in modeling transport and fluid dynamics at the mesoscopic scale, theoretical calculations have been feasible only with simplifying assumptions. As such there is great interest in numerical schemes for Computational Fluctuating Hydrodynamics (CFHD). There are a variety of algorithms (e.g., spectral, finite element, lattice Boltzmann) but in this introduction we focus on finite volume schemes. Accompanying these notes is a demonstration program in Python available on GitHub (https://github.com/AlejGarcia/IntroFHD).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.12157,
  title  = {An Introduction to Computational Fluctuating Hydrodynamics},
  author = {Alejandro L. Garcia and John B. Bell and Andrew Nonaka and Ishan Srivastava and Daniel Ladiges and Changho Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.12157},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:09:39.589Z